Following a third explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, the reports this evening about the new blast are seemingly contradictory.

“Some early reports in the Japanese press suggested the latest explosion amounted to a different and more critical problem than the previous two,” the New York Times reports. While the BBC says, “Some staff have been evacuated, but initial indications suggest it is not on the same scale as the previous blasts.”

Likewise there are conflicting reports about whether the explosion compromised the reactor’s containment vessel.

Small government diehard Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has announced that he’s going off the reservation and won’t vote for the new continuing resolution (to keep the government running) endorsed by Speaker Boehner and the GOP leadership. This is not inconsistent with Flake’s longtime position on these sorts of issues. But remember, he’s also running for Senate now from Arizona. So these crosscutting currents are starting to cause trouble for the Speaker.

Wisconsin’s Senate Majority Leader announces that the fourteen senate Dems who returned to the state over the weekend have lost their right to vote in senate committees.

Wisconsin Dems say they’ve already collected 45% of the signatures needed to recall the eight state senate Republicans currently eligible for a recall vote.

That freshman New Hampshire state Rep who said “defective people” (including the mentally ill, the retarded and the drug addicted) should be sent to Siberia to die has now resigned.

Press statement from the New Hampshire House Speaker after the fold … Read More

I gather from this NYT report that the reactor at Daiichi that until today seemd to be doing okay has, within the span of 24 hours (maybe just 12 hours), become the most dangerously crippled of all the troubled reactors in Japan. For those keeping track, that is reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant:

The extreme challenge of managing reactor No. 2 came as officials were still struggling to keep the cores of two other reactors, No. 1 and No. 3, covered with seawater. There was no immediate indication that either of those two reactors had experienced a crisis as serious as that at No. 2

The Times also quotes a senior nuclear industry executive as saying that “full-scale panic” has set in among Japanese power industry managers. “They’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do,” the source told the Times.

In the midst of debt ceiling battle, freshman Staten Island GOP Rep. Michael Grimm (R) launches broadside against “extreme wing” of GOP.

We’ve compiled the most compelling video to come out of the Japan megadisaster. Take a look.

Chuck Schumer invites Speaker Boehner to embrace political oblivion by abandoning the Tea Party.

Stunning shots from post-tsunami Japan:

My wife made the point over the weekend that we are all to one degree or another inured to the images coming out of Japan because of our long-term exposure to disaster movies, which I think is right. If you try to imagine never having seen 2012 and its countless antecedents — which isn’t easy to do (although I really wish I hadn’t seen 2012) — the images take on new significance.